Here’s the good news about the live-action Star Wars television series that has been in development for years: It’s apparently just like the movies, but on a weekly basis. Here’s the bad news: It may be too expensive to actually make.

The live action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don’t know how to do ’em. Because, they literally are Star Wars, only we’re going to have to try to do them [at] a tenth [of] the cost. And, it’s a huge challenge… lot bigger than what we thought it was gonna be.

It’s a shame, because what we do know about the project makes it sound like something worth seeing.

The series was originally proposed as 100 hour-long episodes filling in the space between the fall of the Republic at the end of Revenge of The Sith and the ongoing rebellion against the Empire seen at the start of A New Hope, although producer Rick McCallum later suggested an alternate plan of running multiple series simultaneously to tell a massive arc of somewhere around 400 episodes. The show would be different in tone from either the movies or The Clone Wars, moving towards a darker, more character-based storytelling instead of the operatic sweep of Star Wars as we know it, and would’ve, for the most part, focused on non-Jedi or Sith characters (Which makes sense, considering the Jedi were effectively wiped out in Revenge, and considered a myth by the start of A New Hope), with McCallum telling an interviewer to “think about bounty hunter” when it comes to lead characters. George Lucas himself was rumored to be writing the show’s first season, but other writers were being brought onboard, or at least interviewed for positions; in his book A Writer’s Tale, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies talks about meeting with Lucas to work on the show (He turned down the opportunity, sadly; I would’ve loved to have seen his take on the universe, considering how much of his Who seemed a love letter to Lucas).

I have to admit, I really hope that this show finds its way into production and onto our television screens; there’s something massively appealing to me about the idea of longform exploration of the Star Wars universe pre-Star Wars (the first movie), when everything was becoming the world so many people fell in love with the first time around, without the expectations and plot weight of having to tell Darth Vader’s origin story at the same time. Fingers crossed that the Force will ultimately be strong with this one.

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